M.J. Rose

A mystery of the most creepy and dark nature — there is good story fodder here for a very dark book…

Could it be true?

Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk (1836)

(The Public Domain Review)

“In the prevailing anti-Catholic atmosphere of early-nineteenth-century America, and fresh after the Ursuline Convent riots of August 1834 in Massachusetts (in which a convent of the Roman Catholic Ursuline nuns burned down by the hands of a Protestant mob), the publication of Maria Monk’s revelations of her time at the Hôtel-Dieu convent in Montreal became a sensation. With nuns forced to engage in sexual acts with priests and being locked in the cellar as a punishment for disobeying, the story had similarities to the popular Gothic novels of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Maria also tells of how any babies that were born as a result of these liaisons were immediately baptized, strangled, and buried under the convent. It was from this fate that she wanted to save her unborn child which led her to escape and consequently publish her exposé.

Although the preface claims the events and persons described to be real, after the initial sensation died down some began to question the veracity of Maria’s tale. American journalist William L. Stone traveled to Montreal and visited the convent, later writing that the descriptions found in Maria’s book bore no resemblance to the actual building…”

For the rest, click here.

So stunning, so poignant.

Imprisoned in Ash: The Plaster Citizens of Pompeii

By Atlas Obscura/Salon

“Those that did not flee the city of Pompeii in August of 79 AD were doomed. Buried for 1,700 years under 30 feet of mud and ash and reduced by the centuries to skeletons, they remained entombed until excavations took place in the early 19th century…”

Click here for a gallery of incredible photographs of the plaster casts, and links to more about the world’s hidden wonders.

A beautiful representation of the theory of four-dimensional space….

(When we think of the “tesseract” we are reminded of our favorite books of childhood, A Wrinkle In Time.)

“A series of images from Charles Howard Hinton’s The Fourth Dimension (1904), a book all about the “tesseract” – a four-dimensional analog of the cube, the tesseract being to the cube as the cube is to the square. Hinton, a British mathematician and science fiction writer, actually coined the term “tesseract” which appears for the first time in his book A New Era of Thought (1888). We are not going to pretend to have given the time to his book to understand fully the concept behind these diagrams, but they are a fascinating series of images all the same (particular the coloured frontispiece featured above), and offer a glimpse into the theory of four-dimensional space which would prove so important to the development of modern physics. Although Hinton’s work was an important stepping stone in understanding four-dimensional space, the real breakthrough came in a 1908 paper by Hermann Minkowski, in which four-dimensional space was thought of in non-Euclidean terms, leading to the revolutionary concept of “spacetime”…”

More here. And many extremely strange and wonderful diagrams!